definition of toxic people — (a thorough investigation)
a friend, by which i mean a man who once owed me three hundred dollars, asked me last week to define what i mean when i call certain people the bad kind. i told him i would write it down. this is me writing it down.
writing this from my desk. carla is up on the third floor at the renewal review that runs until lunch. i have, by my count, the rest of the morning. proceeding.
definition of toxic people: a working definition of toxic people, drafted from a desk on a weekday by a man with no credentials and a folder named evidence. toxic people are the ones whose presence quietly subtracts from your week without ever appearing on the receipt. you only spot the pattern when you measure across months, not minutes.
definition of toxic people, the academic version i invented
so. the definition of toxic people, as i have constructed it, sitting here, with a coffee gone room temperature and a calendar invite i declined three times: a person becomes the bad kind when their baseline cost to be near, measured in tuesdays, exceeds the cumulative warmth they generate over the same period. that is the working definition. i wrote it on a post-it on the monitor i was issued.
i have, in the absence of any actual training, attributed this definition to a fake authority i invented. i am calling him doctor brennan, of the institute for relational accounting, which does not exist. brennan does not exist. neither does the institute’s quarterly newsletter, which i am also citing. it says, on page four, that the definition of toxic people is “the people whose presence produces a small but persistent ledger imbalance, payable in sleep.”
i agree with brennan, even though i made him up. the version i actually use, half-listening at a dinner, is shorter: people you feel lighter without. people for whom “they’re going through a lot” stopped explaining things in 2021. people you have a folder for. the folder is named “evidence”. everyone has the folder. nobody admits to it.
the textbook definition, briefly, before i argue with it
the textbook version — and by textbook i mean a website i opened, read for forty seconds, then closed because a meeting invite popped up — describes toxic people as individuals whose patterns of behavior cause emotional, psychological, or relational harm to others, often through manipulation, criticism, or chronic negativity. that is the proper sentence. it has the right kind of words. it would survive in a paper.
i would like to argue with it. not because it’s wrong, but because it is, frankly, not enough. the textbook reads like something a committee approved — the kind of sentence you nod at and forget on the elevator. it does not, for example, mention the way the air in a room reorganizes itself when one of these people walks in. it does not mention how you find yourself, three years later, having an argument with them in your own shower.
what it leaves out, brennan and i agree, is the cumulative measurement. one bad evening with someone is an evening. seven of them, in a season, with the same person — that’s the data. that’s where the working version actually lives. in the count. for the longer treatment of the mechanism, see the pillar i keep returning to, gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen.
the people who are NOT toxic but call themselves so
this is where the term, i’m fairly sure, has started to lose its grip on a wednesday. there is, online, a population of people who declare they have “cut out toxic people” the way you might announce you have switched seed oils. it is a posture. you see it and you nod, like you nodded at stefan when he said the wine had notes of forest floor.
productivity bro, online, posts a thread once a quarter explaining how he removed three of them and his energy is now a clean nine out of ten. productivity bro has never met a person he did not classify. he thinks toxic is the same thing as inconvenient. it is not. malignant narcissism is a thing. mild irritation about your group chat is not.
this is where i would deploy a hot take, and i will. brennan is fine with it. “pineapple on pizza is fine. the rest of pizza is the problem.” that’s HT8 from the file on the standing desk i sit at. it applies in spirit. the people calling themselves toxic-free on a podcast are arguing about the pineapple. they are not, as a class, looking at the pizza.
i have a third yoga mat under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving down there, and i can tell you with confidence that “toxic” has become the new pineapple — a small visible thing people fight about while ignoring the cheese, the sauce, the crust, and whether the pizza was a good idea to begin with. the actual mechanism is in the crust. the crust does not trend.
the people who ARE toxic and have great press
the inverse problem, and the more dangerous one, is the population of people who fully meet the working version and yet, somehow, have a glowing PR campaign. these are the calm ones. the patient ones. the ones who, at brunch, will mention, in passing, that you looked tired at the wedding three years ago, in a way that haunts you for a week.
my ex, who now lives, i believe, with someone who owns a specific volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways, was one of these. fluent. articulate. friendly to waiters. people loved them at parties. brennan, i’m fairly sure, would call this “surface affability as structural cover for relational deficit”, except brennan doesn’t exist, and i’m allowed to put any sentence i want in his mouth.
see the parallel discussion in narcissist definition and traits, and in define toxic people, where i ran the same argument from the other direction last week.
this is also where the algorithm comes in. the algorithm doesn’t care. it rewards whoever writes the most confident sentence in 14 seconds of vertical video. that person, frequently, is exactly the person the working version would identify as the bad kind. the algorithm then puts that person on your feed. the algorithm thinks it is helping. the algorithm is the man who calls, in a different costume. i don’t pick up either of them.
why the term is failing on a wednesday
here’s what i think is happening, and you can write this down. the word toxic got loaned out, around 2018 or so, and never came back. it’s now used for coworkers, ex-friends, ex-jobs, ex-yoga instructors, and one specific kind of supermarket lighting. when a word does that much work, it gets thin — so thin that the people who actually need it cannot use it without being accused of overstating.
the homer version is shorter. i used to think a person was toxic because they made me sad. then i thought it was because they made me anxious. then i thought it was because they made me write things down on receipts. the truth is closer to the count. count the tuesdays. for the prior attempt at this, see toxic people meaning, which i wrote when i was first trying to articulate this.
see also the seventh microwave, the one i replaced last month after the spaghetti incident. that microwave was a blameless object and i ended its life anyway. the microwave was not toxic. the situation was. the working definition of toxic people, sharpened, has to distinguish between the appliance and the operator, and most online discourse is, frankly, shouting at the appliance.
closing — the certified letter detail
which brings us, briefly, to the drawer in my apartment. there are three certified letters in it. one arrived in a green envelope, signature required, on a wednesday, while i was technically at work but actually on a long lunch. the post office tried twice. on the third attempt they left a slip. the slip is also in the drawer. the letters are unopened. brennan, who does not exist, has filed an affidavit saying this is fine. i’ll get to them. tomorrow is, traditionally, when i get to things.
that’s the post. that’s the topic. that’s the working definition of toxic people, drafted from a desk that is not legally mine to use for this purpose, attributed to a doctor i invented, sealed by a letter i refuse to open. yours stupidly, idiot again.
P.S. brennan would also like to mention that 12 angry men on imdb is a movie about exactly this — twelve people in a room, slowly noticing that the loudest one is not the most correct one. brennan watches it once a year. brennan does not exist. the movie does. that is, on tuesdays, the whole problem.
